Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Tar Sands and Why They Matter

Sign up HERE to join peaceful protests and civil disobedience in Washington DC, against the tar sands pipeline, in August. When I watched the videos and saw the massive tailing ponds full of carcinogens, all I could think of is the unprecedented flooding that started in the spring and is still worsening in the Midwest and Canada. What insanity!

10 comments:

People still don't seem to get that we have poisoned our own environment. Alot of the pollution in the air has contributed to many health problems. Hopefully, one day, they would open their eyes, before they become blind.

When climate change and environmentalism first came up, very few people were cognizant of how bad it would become, how quickly. And so it was safer to speculate when collapse didn't seem quite so imminent.

Since then, industries that profit from greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution realize they have to hurry up and extract every bit they can in the time that's left, and so they vastly stepped up their denial machine. Likewise, scientists and activists who have started realizing that, basically, it's too late to save much if anything of human civilization have gone into their own form of denialism, which often boils down to desperate faith in a bunch of technological hail mary's like different techniques for geoengineering, and renewable green sources of energy.

Excellent site, thank you for the link! Did you see Gary's meltdown at the Geophysical Society? Personally I loved it. There's a link to the transcript and some excerpts at the end of this post if you missed it:http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/01/cry-of-whippoorwill.html

Figures - the other brothers, Charles and David, are having their bi-annual conservative freak show this weekend in Denver: http://www.neweranews.org/blog/koch-bros-in-vail-gathering-corporate-money-for-2012-elections

Maybe Billy has decided blood is thicker than water - and there is no honor among thieves...

The tar oil sands...a horrible deadly project. I can barely get myself to watch these videos. Is the priviledge of being able to drive cars and use plastic worth the destruction, pollution and health problems? Another sign that profit comes before human health in this culture we live in. Thanks for sharing.

Desert Dreamer, I think seeing at least part of the film is useful because it conveys the dauntingly enormous scale like no written description or mere intellectual knowledge could. I don't take it as discouraging. It makes me realize how vitally important it is to fight it.

Hopefully there will be a great turnout in Washington later this summer. Certainly more people are learning fast about tar sands and fracking and so forth.